


Sleepless

by sharkneto



Series: not alone [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, companion to Lonely Drunk, just a quiet moment between siblings, like it's sorta bittersweet fluff but nothing really happens, no beta we die like ben, not necessary to read Lonely Drunk first, this might be fluff? did i actually write fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 07:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30085260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkneto/pseuds/sharkneto
Summary: Vanya can't sleep. She shouldn't be surprised that Five can't, either.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves
Series: not alone [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2213619
Comments: 11
Kudos: 76





	Sleepless

Vanya tosses in her bed again. This is what she gets for sleeping over at the Academy instead of just going home to her own apartment and her own bed. The dream had been quick, thankfully, but she can’t get Pogo’s horrified face or how much she _relished_ seeing it from her mind.

She rolls over and checks the clock, again. 2:13. A whole five minutes from when she last checked it. Flopping back over, she studies the bland furniture of the guest room. She doesn’t miss her closet of a bedroom but it is irritating that Klaus annexed it. It’s hard to get too mad about it, though. It’s not like she’d be sleeping any better there than she is here.

2:15. Is time moving even slower? Vanya throws her covers off with a sigh and rolls out of bed. She needs to get out of her head. A change of scenery and a snack will help. Grabbing a hoodie on the way, she pads out and down the hall.

It’s dark but Vanya has been sneaking around these halls forever, she knows which steps creak and that end table leg that sticks out farther than it seems it should. She’s always sort of preferred the Academy at night, especially when she was younger. It let her feel completely invisible.

The house is quiet, which makes sense. Allison is in California, Diego went home with his cop friend after family dinner, and Klaus is out doing whatever it is Klaus does. Luther and Five must be sleeping like normal people do when it’s the middle of the night.

She realizes she’s wrong when she reaches the entry. There’s a flickering light and quiet voices coming from the living room; someone is watching TV. With a small frown, Vanya pulls her hoodie tighter around herself and pads over on stockinged feet to see who it is.

It’s Five, of course. He’s hard for her to see at first, curled up on himself in the corner of one of the couches, the top of his head barely visible over the back. She smiles a little when she recognizes the show on TV. It’s one of the History Channel’s conspiracy shows, probably about aliens or something.

Vanya steps farther into the room, yawning to announce herself to Five. He cranes his neck to look over the armrest at her. “Hey, Vanya,” he says, voice scratchy with exhaustion.

“Hey, Five. Couldn’t sleep?”

He shrugs.

“Me neither,” Vanya continues. “Do you mind if I join you? I could use a little company.”

“You can do whatever you want, Vanya. I won’t stop you.” His attention is back on the TV.

She shuffles a little. It’s not an invitation but it’s also not a dismissal. She decides to take it as an invitation. “Thanks, Five. I was going to get a snack from the kitchen, too. I can bring something back for you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Ok.” Vanya dithers there for a few seconds before awkwardly turning to head to the kitchen. Once there, she stares blankly in the pantry. She doesn’t actually know what she’s hungry for. If she wanted to, she could go get Mom to make them something. That feels excessive, though, and she feels bad interrupting Mom in the middle of the night, even if she wouldn’t mind one bit.

She needs something Five might eat, too. He said he didn’t want anything but he didn’t eat much at dinner and he’s so small. Vanya has good luck just making extra of whatever she’s eating and leaving it within reach of Five. He’ll eventually nibble.

Chewing on her lip, she settles on peanut butter toast and some warm milk with honey. Perfect for helping bring sleep. It takes a little juggling, but a few minutes later she has a plate with four slices, slathered in Five’s favorite peanut butter, and two steaming mugs of milk balanced in her arms.

It’s a relief to set it all down on the coffee table in the living room; her grip had slipped and she’d almost dropped everything only a few steps out from the kitchen. “I know you said you didn’t want anything but I made extra in case you changed your mind,” she says, standing up and moving one of the mugs to the end table and in easy reach for Five.

Five just flashes her a grimace before his attention is back to the TV. From this angle, Vanya can see how tiny he’s made himself. His knees are at his shoulders and he has his arms tightly crossed around his chest. He barely takes up a whole cushion on the couch.

Not commenting on it, Vanya sits at the other end of the couch and pulls a blanket over herself. She grabs a piece of toast. Its crunch is very satisfying in the quiet. She turns to watch the show with him, a man on the screen emphatically describing how aliens blew up the Hindenburg.

It doesn’t hold her interest for very long. As the show shifts and the gruff narrator talks over historical footage, Vanya shifts to study Five from the corner of her eye. He’s wearing his Umbrella Academy pajamas, a knitted sweater wrapped around his shoulders and thick socks on his feet. He’s uncurled minutely since she’s joined him. She doesn’t think he’s actually watching the show either, his gaze distant. He looks very tired and very old.

Luther had called a family meeting last week to let them all know Five wasn’t doing well, was drinking more and struggling harder to stay out of apocalypse memories. Vanya felt like shit that she hadn’t noticed. She’s been busy with her orchestra, relearning her violin so she can play it without activating her giant, Earth-destroying powers, so she hadn’t been thinking about how well Five was adjusting to the real world. They’d gotten coffee together just a few days before and he’d seemed fine, his usual weird self. Her therapist reminded her that she can’t expect to be able to read her brother’s mind and there’s only so much she can do if he’s not openly asking for help. It’s a good reminder that Vanya mostly ignores.

It’s why she stayed later tonight after family dinner and chose to sleep over, putting her in this sleepless predicament.

Maybe if she shares why she can’t sleep, he’ll share with her why he can’t.

At the next commercial break, Vanya breaks the silence. “I had a bad dream.”

Five’s gaze flicks over to her, eyes shining in the glow from the TV. He doesn’t say anything but his attention stays on her. He’s listening. She swallows. “I was destroying the Academy and killing Pogo, all over again.”

He hums for her to continue. He’s turned slightly so he’s facing her more fully. Vanya keeps her attention on the TV, only glancing at Five from her peripheral. “What really scared me was how much I enjoyed doing it, in the dream. How much I wanted to hurt Pogo and destroy everything. It reminds me of how good it felt when I actually did all that.”

Silence hangs as a jingle for a mop fills the background. Vanya takes a sip of her warm milk and waits to see if Five is going to say anything. As the commercial changes, Five murmurs, “It’s part of you. Taking it out in a dream seems like a safe way to do it.”

“I don’t want it to be part of me.”

He snorts quietly. “I don’t think we get a lot of choice in that.”

She wasn’t expecting comfort from Five, necessarily, but she also wasn’t expecting that. She doesn’t know how to take it. The idea that that’s just who she is underneath, violent and vengeful, sits uncomfortably in her chest.

The show comes back on. They sit together in silence, Five distant and Vanya stewing on what he said. At the next commercial break, she says, “I think you’re wrong.”

His attention flicks back to her and he raises an eyebrow. Vanya continues, “We choose who we are, by choosing our actions and how we feel about them. I don’t want to be that Vanya, the White Violin. She scares me. I choose to not be her.”

“So then why are you so upset about a dream if it doesn’t mean anything?”

“It’s a reminder. Of what could happen if I chose to go that way. I don’t want to hurt anyone and I have such potential to. It’s scary. But because I find it scary and wrong, it means I’m choosing right to be the person I want to be.”

From his blank expression, she can tell he doesn’t get it. Knowing what she knows about his life, he must not feel like he’s ever had a choice. He has, though. “You’ve made choices about who you are,” she says, confident.

A shadow crosses his face and his jaw clenches. Vanya rushes to explain. “I mean, you haven’t had a lot of choices, you were stuck for a long time and had some pretty shitty options. But you chose to survive because you loved us so much. You don’t like the work you did for the Commission. Every step of the way you’ve chosen us over yourself. Those are the choices that define you.”

Five looks away from her and doesn’t say anything, curling tighter and undoing the small amount of progress he’d made in relaxing. She didn’t expect him to respond. It’s late and that’s a lot of feelings for her to dump on him. Still, it’s good for him, she thinks. Vanya lets it drop, though, and turns back to the TV.

The show has a new so-called expert on, talking about the lasers the aliens must have used to blow up the Hindenburg. Vanya snorts at an animation of his theory. “Why are you watching this, Five?”

He shoots her a glance and the corner of his mouth twitches up. “It’s stupid.”

She can’t argue with that. “I guess they picked a good conspiracy to add aliens to. No one can say it wasn’t aliens if no one knows what actually happened.”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I know what happened to the Hindenburg.”

Vanya turns to look at him. She needs to stop being surprised by Five’s immense and sketchy knowledge of history. “Was it sabotage?”

“Originally.”

“It changed?”

“The guy who sabotaged decided not to. I corrected it during my one day in Management. Removed the pilot’s butcher to delay take-off and let static electricity build up.”

That makes no sense but history by Five rarely does. And now Vanya knows that her brother orchestrated the Hindenburg disaster, which is very fun.

Five grabs one of the peanut butter toasts and quickly retracts back into his ball. He munches quietly, sipping the lukewarm milk to wash it down. Vanya smiles to herself that her plan worked. When he’s done, silence descends again.

As the show’s credits start rolling, he says, “I was back there.”

Vanya is half asleep at this point, the milk doing its job along with the monotony of the narrator’s voice. Her brain slowly puts the pieces together that he’s talking about why he’s awake. “The apocalypse?”

He nods.

“Do you dream about it a lot?”

There’s a pause before he nods again, a small jerk of his head.

“I’m sorry, Five. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He brought it up, though, so Vanya thinks he might actually want to talk about it. Five is frustrating. He drives her nuts with how he refuses to open up to any of them in any real way, how he refuses their offers of help or to get him help.

How’s he supposed to get any better if he doesn’t let them help him get better?

Vanya decides to gamble and push a little. “Can I ask what the apocalypse was like?”

“You can ask whatever you want, Vanya.”

She knows he knows what she means. She waits to see if he’s actually going to answer or not. Some show about World War I starts on the TV.

“Lonely,” Five says, breaking the quiet. “The apocalypse was lonely.”

“I can’t imagine,” Vanya says quietly. She’s had a lonely life, but Luther is the only one of them who can even come close to understanding the type of solitude Five endured.

Five shrugs, a small twitch of his shoulders that shifts his whole body, he’s so tightly compressed around himself.

“Well,” she says after a moment, “I have some good news.” She waits until he looks at her before she continues. “I’m here, right now. You’re not alone.”

A small smile curls his lips. “So you are.”

Vanya lifts the edge of her blanket in invitation, already mentally preparing herself for rejection. It’s not personal, it’s just Five scrambling to try and figure out how to be a person again.

The moment hangs, suspended: Five frozen and considering, her patiently waiting with her arm out and blanket open.

Just as her arm is getting tired, he shifts. Slowly, he uncurls and scoots towards her. Carefully, gently, cautiously, he tucks himself along her side. They’re about the same size, which is small, so the blanket easily covers them both. He rests his head on her shoulder. She rests her forehead against his.

With a small start, Vanya realizes this is the closest her and Five have been since he’s been back. Five months and she’s only just now cuddling her brother. They used to do this all the time, when they were little. She swallows the emotion. She doesn’t want to ruin the moment.

“How do you think the aliens start World War One?” Vanya asks, nodding unnecessarily at the TV.

“Mind control,” he answers immediately.

She smiles. “As long as you don’t tell me it was actually you that shot Franz Ferdinand,” she jokes.

Five doesn’t say anything.

“Five?”

“You just said you didn’t want to know.” She can hear the smile in his voice.

Vanya gives it about a fifty-fifty chance that he’s joking. “So I did.”

They settle in to watch the show. Five’s right – aliens apparently started the war through mind control. Five falls asleep only a few minutes into it. Vanya drifts off a short while after him.

That’s how Luther finds them in the morning, curled around one another under their blanket, TV a white noise in the background.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have a giant author's note of thoughts for this one. Just a quiet moment between the two smallest siblings. Forever soft for how soft Five is for Vanya. 
> 
> No beta, lemme know if something is wonky up there.
> 
> As always, love to hear from you all. Your thoughts and comments clear my skin and water my crops. Down below or drop me a line on tumblr a sharkneto


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